The plans for a behavioral health hub at UCSD’s East Campus Medical Center continue to evolve with the receipt of a $10 million donation from Price Philanthropies.
Plans to use the hospital’s westernmost building as a significant resource to increase midcity psychiatric treatment capacity go back to 2022, when the college-area facility on Interstate 8 was still called Alvarado Hospital Medical Center. The county’s behavioral health department proposed expanding an existing 30-bed geriatric psychiatric unit that was up and running and adding a host of other services to the mix.
UC San Diego Health purchased Alvarado in 2023 for $200 million, and previous mental health hub plans with the county fell apart. The university health system subsequently closed its geriatric psychiatric unit at UC San Diego Medical Center in Hillcrest, shifting senior patients to the existing East Campus unit this summer despite outcry from affected employees and some community organizations.
Pitched as a means to decompress the university’s busy main hospitals in La Jolla and Hillcrest, East Campus has been brought into the fold, seeing its overall daily patient census grow by 15% since 2024, according to the university, which indicated Friday that more than 3,500 patients have transferred east after initially being admitted elsewhere.
UCSD has worked since buying Alvarado to adjust its behavioral health vision for its new asset, reducing the overall number of beds dedicated to locked units after the partnership with the county dried up.
Dr. Steve Koh, psychiatrist-in-chief and associate chief medical officer at UC San Diego Health, said in May that plans had been scaled back to add about half as many beds as were originally envisioned, but also mentioned a new initiative to add a “partial hospitalization” plan at East Campus. This program would treat patients for six to eight hours per day, five days per week, serving those with significant needs for mental health care, but not at the point where they would be considered a potential danger to themselves or others and need treatment in a locked unit.
On Thursday, Koh said that the Price donation scales up initial plans, serving as an anchor gift in the university’s push to raise $35 million toward necessary renovations.
Koh said that the new plan is to add a new 20-bed locked unit at East Campus that will serve youth, most likely age 15 and older. The partial hospitalization plan would also expand, with a capacity to serve 50 or 60 clients at a time.
“Previously, we were thinking that the program would have a capacity of about 20 to 30, so it will about double in size,” Koh said.
Price has long made mental health one of its tent-pole public initiatives, starting its contributions focused on youth and families in 2015. More recently, the charitable organization has leaned in on training, as have many organizations, after a 2022 report from the San Diego Workforce Partnership estimated that the region needs 18,500 more behavioral health workers by 2027 in order to meet existing demand for service and replace those expected to leave the profession.
UCSD’s plans for its mental health care expansion at East Campus always included training opportunities for residents and nurse practitioners, but Koh said that the grant expands the educational scope.
“Now, what we’re envisioning is a health workforce pipeline hub,” Koh said. “It’s going to be a full complement of a behavioral health team that’s going to be designed to see patients and train together.”
According to a statement released last week, the hub will include psychiatry physicians, mental health nurse practitioner fellows, physician assistant students from UC San Diego School of Medicine and students studying nursing, social work, counseling and therapy from other schools in the region.
Koh said UCSD is also moving all of its electroconvulsive therapy to East Campus. ECT uses small electric currents passed through a patient’s brain to treat conditions such as severe depression and other conditions when other approaches have failed.
The resource is expected to open in 2028.